


War of the Triffids

by MrProphet



Category: The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 17:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10702026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	1. Summer of the Triffids

Bill Masen, my father – well, foster-father, if it makes any difference – once explained to me why we celebrate Christmas. He said that it was a festival of light in the middle of the darkest season of the year, to remind us that the days will get longer and the weather will get warmer.

Maybe that’s so, but I know that I celebrate Christmas for a different reason: Christmas is in the middle of winter and no Triffid ever attacks in midwinter. Winter is our quiet time, our sanctuary; spring brings the horrors back.

Well, it’s in spring that the first attacks come, but those are just sporadic raids; five, ten, maybe twenty Triffids at a time, testing our defences and incidentally giving us a chance to test our new herbicides. Unfortunately, the Russians – or whoever – did a good job of making them resistant to disease, poisons, crop blights and just about anything and everything else that kills plants. In almost fifteen years we still hadn’t come up with anything better than a shotgun blast or razor blade to the stem, or a good incendiary when we have the fuel or the chemicals.

But it’s the summer that kills us.

We’ve been here at Portchester Castle for three years. It’s our beachhead for taking back the mainland.

Actually, that’s a lie. Not a lie I’m telling to you, my hypothetical reader, but a lie we told ourselves. We weren’t ready to take back anything, but we had to do something.

So we took back Portchester, secured it up to the sea and rebuilt the castle walls to keep the Triffids out. And for three years running the first hot day of summer brought them out in swarms.

This morning it was hot. This morning my man woke me up early, fixed me with his blind eyes and said: “They’re coming.”

He’s a good listener, my Alex. Blind as anyone who saw the meteor storm, but he can hear them drumming five miles away. We make a good pair; he hears them coming, I kill them.

They’re coming today, and we’ll kill them, just like last year. We can’t take back the country, but this little bit of it is ours and it will  _stay_  ours forever.


	2. Voice of the Triffids

“It sounds wrong, Susan,” Alex announced.

Now, my opinion is that Triffids  _always_  sound wrong – the rattle of the sticks against the boll of the trunk turns my blood cold every time I hear it – but Alex is an expert. He’s a listener, that man of mine; better even than most of the blind. He’s the first one to hear the rattles every spring and he’s even trained himself to identify different Triffid strains by ear. I asked him if he’d found a new strain, but he said no.

“This is different,” he explained. “Each Triffid strain has its own rhythm; it seems to help them cluster together in…” He tailed off; we still hadn’t managed to find an acceptable collective noun for Triffids. “But this isn’t a matter of rhythm; it’s about proliferation.”

“Explain.”

“When a Triffid detects the rumble of a generator, or when it loses its stem, or… when it just feels like it, it drums. Other Triffids detect the sound and if they recognise the pulse of their… herd, they do two things. First they drum in turn and then they move towards the sound. Every few hundred yards – it varies from strain to strain, but within a strain the difference is never more than a few feet - they stop, drum for about a minute and then move on.

“This means that the drumming spreads out from the original drummer in rings; clearly identifiable clusters all drumming together in turn.”

“Like… ripples in a pond?” I asked.

He nodded. “But this is different. They’re not moving, just drumming. Standing in place, drumming for five, ten minutes at a stretch and then stopping, like a chain of dominoes, each setting off the next in the pattern.”

“And then they move?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “That’s the strangest thing; they don’t move. Always before we’ve seen the Triffids home in on the drumming, usually seeking food. This… It’s more like a signal, passing from plant to plant; like we send messages with the signal beacons, or the lamps.”

I shivered. “You mean…?”

“They’re sending messages,” he agreed. “And the rhythms shift and change,” he added. “It’s not just a simple ‘here I am’. There’s meaning in the drumming. I won’t say words, but there’s an intent and a purpose to each signal.”

I tightened my hand on the stock of my Triffid gun. “Triffids that talk,” I muttered. “Good.”

“Good?”

I tensed the spring, knowing that Alex would hear the sharp clack. “If they get smart enough, they can start to be afraid.”


	3. Power of the Triffids

David crouched down and sifted the soil through his fingers. It crumbled at his touch, filtering away as a fine, grey dust which floated on the breeze.

He looked up at Alex. “Where's the nearest triffid?”

“The nearest spinney is miles away,” Alex replied, “but there are a few outliers keeping an eye on us, as it were.”

“Outliers?” David asked.

“Scouts,” I explained. “What strain?”

“Delta. They're playing your song,” Alex added.

David smiled. “You still think they're talking about you?”

“I  _know_  they're talking about Susan” – he flashed me a smile – “you and I are just mammals to them.”

“Tell me about the soil,” I insisted. “It's like this on half of the old Council enclaves.”

“It's been drained of nutrients,” David explained. “It's a result of heavy triffid infestation; we see it on the test farm, back on the Island. It's why we have to move the compound every few years.

“Most carnivorous plants feed on flesh because they grow in areas with nutrient-poor soil; the flesh makes up the deficit. With triffids it's not the same; they  _need_  meat, all the time, wherever they grow. If they can't get it, they drain the soil.”

I nodded in understanding. “So, when the triffids have killed all of the animal life in an area, they deplete the soil and move on.”

“And this is happening a lot?” David asked.

“There aren't many animals left outside of the surviving enclaves,” I explained, “and of course the Portchester site.”

David nodded slowly. “This is what I'm afraid of. The triffids don't just kill us; they kill everything. They kill the land itself, so that not even they can live there.”

Realisation crept over me, cold and suffocating. “The seed cycle.”

David looked up. “You know about the seed cycle?”

“I know I don't have your training,” I told him, trying not to sound bitter, “but I have more experience of triffids than anyone in the country, perhaps the world. My team spotted the change in the seed cycle three years ago; we were the ones who sent Dad the reports.”

“My father already knew,” David assured me. “We spotted the trend in the test farm  _four_  years ago.” He never misses a chance to score a point, but he hasn't the nerve for a stand-up row, so it was no surprise that he raced on to add: “The seed cycle lengthens when nutrients are scarce; fewer seeds, released less often.”

“They know,” I told him. “It's not adaptation; it's a choice. We've seen rival strains of triffids fighting over territory.”

“A triffid isn't susceptible to another triffid's sting,” he scoffed.

“No; it gets ugly watching them try to strangle each other, roots twisting around roots... The Delta strain are the smartest; the most dangerous. They were the first to start attacking other strains unprovoked to secure good territory; they'll be the last to survive and the ones who kill us.”

“They're smart, but only animal smart,” David insisted.

“Animals don't fight for useless territory,” Alex reminded him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the Delta strain scout has got company. I can hear signals from an entire spinney; they're coming especially to kill us.”

“That's ridiculous!”

I shrugged. “Stay if you like; we're leaving. If the Delta strain doesn't kill you I'll gladly listen to you tell me you told me so.”

I led Alex to the electric car and we scrambled in. By the time I'd started the motor, David was in the back seat.

“Nothing wrong with being cautious,” he told me.

“Of course,” I agreed. “Just being cautious.”


	4. The Rescue

The official policy of our lot – in as much as a group that still doesn’t have a name after twenty years can really be said to have formulated a party line – is that the self-styled Supreme Council (who used to be the Emergency Council) are no threat and are best ignored. My father, in his own account, notes the fall of many of their ‘feudal seigneuries’, but Brighton just keeps going and every time one of their damnable slave farms falls, they set up another one.

They’ve got people, you see; and when their blind slave class started to die out… Well, a surprising number of offences carry a sentence of indentured servitude. Still, it’s useful for me, because they bus in dozens of these poor serfs at a time with just a handful of guards, and that means they don’t notice if an extra body finds her way into the line at one of the rest stops.

Now, the intelligent reader will no doubt be wondering  _why_  I should want to find my way onto a bus full of slaves travelling to one of the most squalid recesses of my triffid-infested former homeland, and it is a question not without merit. It’s not the thought of doing some honest toil with my hands, I’ll tell you that for nothing; neither is it the prospect of three square meals of mashed triffid a day, with rat on Sundays.

No; I go into the seigneuries because I do take them seriously. Father and the others may consider the Supreme Council a pack of crackpots, but they still make life miserable for a lot of people. I sell the raids to the Island by telling them that we need bodies in Portchester to keep the land and maintain the barricades, but the truth is simpler, and much more personal: I came within a hair’s breadth of being carted away to the Council’s re-education centre in Brighton, and my lover spent fourteen years of his life as a slave in one of those hellholes.

So, we do what we can to bring them down; the southern seignuries at least. When we pick a target we send one or two people in on the buses and then bring up a strike team in one of the electric cars. Wonderful things, those cars; the engine is too quiet to attract triffids from more than a few dozen yards, they have a good turn of speed and the windows are protected by a robust anti-sting mesh. I think they must be my third or fourth favourite of the assets at my disposal as elected constable of Portchester, after Alex, the little device I always carry in my pack during a raid and – depending on my mood – my fellow soldiers of the reclamation.

I don’t stay in the seignuries for long; the itinerary is this: Get in on the slave bus from Brighton; locate the motor pool, serfs’ quarters, generator and armoury; break out and cut the wire; break out the Rattle.

The Rattle is that handy device that sits innocuously in the pack which the camp guards invariably assume to have been checked on leaving Brighton. It’s basically a wooden block, a little bit of clockwork and a drumstick. When you set it off it rattles for over an hour, beating out a rhythm almost identical to a decapitated triffid’s distress call. We use them to decoy the triffids away from our foraging parties, but in the raids it has a rather deadlier role.

Once the wire has been cut – at night, when the triffids are lethargic – I put the Rattle somewhere out of the way in the garrison building; somewhere the guards won’t find it. When it goes off, the triffids storm in and make straight for the garrison, while I load up a bus with serfs and useful supplies. As soon as the siege pours into the camp, my comrades come through the wire or the gate in the car to provide support.

We drive off with the goods and the serfs.

The triffids get the guards, surging over the garrison like a green tide. It’s not pretty, but at least it’s quick. Still, I always try to get the children into the buses before the screaming starts.

That’s the one thing I don’t like. Not the deaths of the guards, I don’t care about them. I’ve met too many to think that there might be good in them; the Council choose only the meanest of spirit for that job.

I just hate using the triffids when I’d rather be killing them. Still, we’re all children of necessity now.


	5. Rise of the Triffids

The third hot summer in a row was never going to be good for us. 

We'd been doing well before that; after almost ten years in Portchester we'd driven the Pale up almost a hundred miles inland, shoring up town walls and connecting them with high, strong fences. There was a lot of excitement on the Island. I kept warning them, though; cold summers and long, hard winters had a lot more to do with it than anything we were doing.

Then came the heat. It started with the winter without frost, when the triffids stayed active halfway through advent. We spent Christmas on the range, burning out spinneys that should have died down naturally. It wouldn't have been so bad if we'd had a mild spring, but we didn't.

By the third spring it was warm like summer and it rained hard. Then came summer and it was ruinous; temperatures in the low eighties. I refused to allow anyone to leave the Pale to work on new camps, which made a lot of people pretty mad, but then came July and Alex heard the drumming; triffids, thousands of them, all Delta strain.

The bad summers had given the soil time to restore its nutrient levels, and Delta had survived where other strains had perished; finding warmth, digging in... Now, the warmth had woken them and they were coming for us.

“Get all the weapons on the walls,” I ordered. “I want scout cars out and go carefully; we need news, not bodies.”

It was more or less as I'd expected; dozens of Delta strain spinneys moving up on the Pale, aiming for the fences, not the towns. I ordered an evacuation through Portchester. The Island queried it, of course.

“The towns are secure,” they insisted.

“But not the fields, and if the towns get cut off, everyone dies. If we shut up the towns, draw back to the inner Pale, house everyone in Portchester or ship them back to the islands, we can hold this year and maybe, if we get a hard winter, reoccupy. If we try to hold the towns, we'll lose them. The triffids will move on them, and if they don't break through the walls then the people will starve.”

In the end they gave in, probably because David backed me up. They listen to him and he's been studying the Delta strain. I'd already started evacuating; I knew the Pale wouldn't last a month.

We got two weeks.

The inner Pale is holding for now, but next year... We need that cold winter, so I suppose we're in the lap of the gods now.

Maybe I should find some time to pray.


End file.
